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Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object; eyes for one
kind, ears for another: similarly some things, we must believe,
are to be known by the Intellectual-Principle in us. We must not
confuse intellection with hearing or seeing; this would be trying
to look with the ears or denying sound because it is not seen.
Certain people, we must keep in mind, have forgotten that to
which, from the beginning onwards, their longing and effort are
pointed: for all that exists desires and aspires towards the
Supreme by a compulsion of nature, as if all had received the
oracle that without it they cannot be.
The perception of Beauty and the awe and the stirring of passion
towards it are for those already in some degree knowing and
awakened: but the Good, as possessed long since and setting up a
natural tendency, is inherently present to even those asleep and
brings them no wonder when some day they see it, since it is no
occasional reminiscence but is always with them though in their
drowse they are not aware of it: the love of Beauty on the
contrary sets up pain when it appears, for those that have seen
it must pursue. This love of Beauty then is later than the love
of Good and comes with a more sophisticated understanding; hence
we know that Beauty is a secondary: the more primal appetition,
not patent to sense, our movement towards our good, gives witness
that The Good is the earlier, the prior.
Again; all that have possessed themselves of The Good feel it
sufficient: they have attained the end: but Beauty not all have
known and those that have judge it to exist for itself and not
for them, as in the charm of this world the beauty belongs only
to its possessor.
Then, too, it is thought enough to appear loveable whether one is
so or not: but no one wants his Good in semblance only. All are
seeking The First as something ranking before aught else, but
they struggle venomously for beauty as something secondary like
themselves: thus some minor personage may perhaps challenge equal
honour with the King's right-hand man on pretext of similar
dependence, forgetting that, while both owe their standing to the
monarch, the other holds the higher rank.
The source of the error is that while both The Good and The
Beautiful participate in the common source, The One precedes
both; and that, in the Supreme also, The Good has no need of The
Beautiful, while the Beautiful does need The Good.
The Good is gentle and friendly and tender, and we have it
present when we but will. Beauty is all violence and
stupefaction; its pleasure is spoiled with pain, and it even
draws the thoughtless away from The Good as some attraction will
lure the child from the father's side: these things tell of
youth. The Good is the older- not in time but by degree of
reality- and it has the higher and earlier power, all power in
fact, for the sequent holds only a power subordinate and
delegated of which the prior remains sovereign.
Not that God has any need of His derivatives: He ignores all that
produced realm, never necessary to Him, and remains identically
what He was before He brought it into being. So too, had the
secondary never existed, He would have been unconcerned, exactly
as He would not have grudged existence to any other universe that
might spring into being from Him, were any such possible; of
course no other such could be since there is nothing that has not
existence once the All exists.
But God never was the All; that would make Him dependent upon the
universe: transcending all, He was able at once to make all
things and to leave them to their own being, He above.
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